Gerard Finley classy in John Adam's Dr Atomic

The baritone, director Penny Woolcock and set and video designers do much to enliven operatic drama about the nuclear bomb

An opera that ends with the explosion of the first atomic bomb cries out for attention. Yet, as an opera rather than a dramatised documentary, the interest of John Adams's Dr Atomic (2005) - receiving its British premiere from English National Opera at the London Coliseum (a production shared with the Metropolitan Opera, New York) - centres on, and is even confined to, the quarter of an hour that ends the first of its two acts.

It is at this point that J Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project scientists who developed and tested the bomb at Los Alamos, in the New Mexico desert, is found for the only time in solitary reflection. He sings an inspired setting of his favourite poem, John Donne's sonnet "Batter my heart, three person'd God" (the line gave rise to the project's other name, Trinity), indirectly expressing his torments of conscience about the terrible nuclear